Image: Toxic Town, Netflix
Almost 20 years after the release of Oscar-winning climate change film An Inconvenient Truth, C21investigates whether the industry can do more to help tackle the ongoing crisis.
On March 4, a 24-hour outdoor advertising campaign appeared across four UK cities – London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. When the air pollution got too high instead of seeing the advertisement, passers-by could only read: “You can’t see this ad because the air quality is currently poor.”
But this wasn’t an ad campaign being run by an environmental watchdog or by the cities’ councils to warn citizens about the dangers of the air they were breathing in; the billboards were promoting the new Netflix British drama miniseries Toxic Town.
Written by Jack Thorne (Adolescence, His Dark Materials), Toxic Town is based on a true story of an environmental scandal that befell the UK town of Corby, where the negligent management of toxic waste in the air was later linked to birth defects in a cluster of children.
Comparisons with the toxic air that hung over LA following the devastating wildfires that erupted January 7, displacing tens of thousands and killing at least 29 people, are easy to make. Human-induced global warming from the burning of fossil fuels made the fires 35% more probable, according to scientists.
After premiering on February 27, Toxic Town entered Netflix’s Top 10 and remained there for four consecutive weeks.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, whose members include some of the biggest players in the entertainment business such as The Walt Disney Company, Netflix, NBCUniversal and Amazon Studios, described Netflix’s Toxic Town billboard stunt as “a powerful message about the persistence of climate issues.”
Yet, almost 20 years since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary movie about global warming, getting some answers on how current content strategies and commissioning decision-making are incorporating climate storytelling on our screens is far from straightforward.
Everything is political
In the US, where the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to federal climate policy, instigating mass layoffs, cutting grants and removing words such as ‘clean energy’, ‘climate crisis’ and ‘climate science’ from government documents, the politics of climate change hangs heavy over an entertainment business already feeling battered and bruised.
“Everything right now is political,” one Hollywood executive, who preferred to remain nameless, told C21. “People are losing jobs, it’s a pretty difficult time regardless [of climate change]. That is causing creative decision-makers and executives to be extremely conservative in their decision-making process, and not just about climate content.”
In the UK, it is more than three years since a dozen streamers and broadcasters, collectively representing over 70% of time UK audiences spend watching TV and film, signed the Climate Content Pledge at COP26. Signatories include the BBC, Sky, ITV and Channel 4, but finding someone among them able or willing to discuss progress at a commissioning level against the pledge feels like pulling teeth. Meanwhile, Albert, the BAFTA-backed architect of the Climate Content Pledge, did not respond to repeated attempts to be interviewed.
So, why the reticence? After all, as recently as November they reported their achievements against the pledge. The BBC said it had “found opportunities to authentically embed sustainability themes into its content”, citing examples such as natural history title Asia, climate thriller On Thin Ice: Putin v Greenpeace, and the Olympics. Meanwhile, it singled out shows such as reality series The Apprentice, drama Vigil, factual show Sort Your Life Out, and quiz show The Hit List, as evidence of how it is “finding audience-relevant ways to reflect sustainability across all genres.”
In February, the UK public service broadcaster, which operates globally through its commercial subsidiary BBC Studios, published its 2024 net zero transition plan. In the report’s introduction, the BBC’s director general Tim Davie wrote: “Surely now we’re at a point where sustainability, the agenda around nature, must be there front and centre. This is a real moment for us to do that. The audience is very interested in this topic and we, as public service broadcasters, have a huge creative opportunity. It’s not just a corporate initiative, it is the priority for next year, to bring it alive even more in programming beyond the obvious strands. That really excites me.”
But a few weeks later, the BBC’s chief content officer, Charlotte Moore, a strong advocate of embedding environmental considerations into BBC content and sponsor of the BBC’s Climate Creative Conference, unexpectedly quit the corporation.
Danielle Mulder, the BBC Group’s director of sustainability, denies Moore’s departure has thrown the corporation off course, but admits that delivering against the pledge is “complicated”.
“[The Climate Content Pledge] was a big moment for those 12 broadcasters to come together on and have complete alignment. And it was a big moment for the BBC,” says Mulder.
Part of the sustainability exec’s role is implementing the pledge, tracking progress against it and training all BBC staff so they can deliver on it. “We have operationalised the Climate Content Pledge,” she says.
Mulder says the BBC has created its own system for tracking climate content, and that ITV, Channel 4 and Sky have also agreed to do the same using separate systems.
It is now mandatory for all producers who work with the BBC to “have a conversation with their commissioner about how they can authentically reflect sustainability or the environment in the editorial of their programme”, and since January 6, they have been expected to fill in an ‘on-screen sustainability form’ for each episode of their commission via the BBC’s Silvermouse production reporting system. This includes a checklist of topics related to “climate change, sustainability, nature-loss and our connection to the natural world.” How those topics are delivered also forms part of the information capture, including if whether “verbally, in dialogue or commentary, or visibly in props, backgrounds or non-verbal actions.”
Mulder says it’s too early to share any findings from the new initiative but expects to have some meaningful data to report on before the end of the year.
The metrics
On the face of it, the global supply of climate-related content is underwhelming. Parrot Analytics, which employs a metric that looks at viewership figures as well as all digital interactions about a show, finds that between 2018 and 2024, the share of supply has remained stubbornly low, at just under 0.2% for scripted and unscripted series, and just under 1% for movies, with the latter trending downwards since 2021. However, demand has outstripped supply, at just below 1% for series and at above 2% for movies.
“Over the last seven years, climate-related titles have consistently outperformed their share of supply, accounting for a higher share of demand both globally and in the US,” says Christofer Hamilton, industry insights manager at Parrot Analytics.
Hamilton explains that Parrot’s methodology is based on keywords that are relevant to the shows. “[We use] granular keyword data, so it is shows that have been tagged with specific keywords such as ‘melting ice’, ‘warming earth’, or ‘climate catastrophe’.” He admits that it’s not likely to pick up shows that include a prop such an electric car, or a conversation about whether to eat a meat or a vegan dish. However, it does pull in shows that don’t explicitly mention climate change, such Netflix’s third most watched film of all time, the 2021 satirical comedy, Don’t Look Up, which is an allegory about the dangers of climate science denial.
Anna Jane Joyner is the founder of Good Energy, a US-based non-profit that consults on climate storytelling in scripted film and TV and whose clients include CBS, Showtime, Apple TV+ and CBC. She says, despite the low output, the industry has moved forward in terms of the range and depth of storytelling that tackles climate change issues within the last decade. She is “hopeful” a comparative report that her organisation will be releasing later this year will show a meaningful rise in the supply of climate-related films and TV series since Good Energy and the USC Norman Lear Centre’s Media Impact Project’s first report on this issue.
In this “first-of-its-kind analysis” of 37,453 TV and movie scripts from 2016-2020, the findings revealed a “glaring absence of climate change in scripted media”. Just 2.8% of all scripts included any climate-related keywords, and only 0.6% of scripted TV and films mentioned the specific term ‘climate change’.
“The genre is really diversified now. In the first half [of the last 10 years], it was primarily superhero films. And then the second half, it has been everything from dramedies to horror to children,” Joyner observes. “We’re really seeing that the variety of genres and different kinds of stories that filmmakers are telling about climate – or just including climate in stories that aren’t focused on it – is definitely getting more diverse and that’s very encouraging.”
Joyner notes that there’s a compelling commercial reason to bring these types of stories to the screen too; last year, Good Energy launched the Climate Reality Check, a tool for writers and industry professionals to evaluate whether climate change is represented – or omitted – in any narrative, using the Bechdel-Wallace Test, a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. It used the test against the 250 most popular films of 2013-2022, and found that only 9.6% of them passed it, but those that did, performed 10% better at the box office than those that did not.
“We’re increasingly able to make the case that it is commercially a very good investment and that audiences clearly do want to see more of their experience reflected on screen because they are watching these films and shows,” she says.
Gaps in the market
Recognising a gap in the market for climate storytelling, Lucy Stone founded global outfit Climate Spring in 2022 and now has a slate of 40+ projects across scripted and unscripted in film and TV. “The entertainment industry has recognised this is the biggest story of our time and they’re not really telling it,” she notes.
Among the projects Climate Spring is consulting on is New Pictures’ drama TV series adaptation of Geoff Dembicki’s book, The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change, an exposé of how fossil fuel companies blocked action to prevent climate change. Writer David MacPherson (The Rig) is adapting the story for the screen. It has also consulted on Spanish-German procedural series Weiss & Morales, and provided climate-related editorial advice on ITV thriller After the Flood, which has just been recommissioned for a second series.
As well as consulting, Climate Spring also helps develop projects through its own fund. “We have a simple mandate of providing some development funding, and then a lot of support in identifying IP, in packaging up projects, being an intermediary between the creatives and the producers and the commissioners who are all interested in this space,” she explains.
In February, Climate Spring announced its first slate of feature films, headed by the Steve Coogan comedy The Good Life (Funny Peculiar Ltd. In association with Bright Pictures Ltd), about a London PR guru who greenwashes the reputations of the world’s worst polluters. Stone says the company plans to announce a TV slate shortly.
Stone says there is “a huge interest in telling [climate-related] stories from talent, from creators, from producers, also from commissioners,” but admits that how to do this “is not easy, especially in the current climate in the entertainment industry.
“It’s not straightforward. It’s got to be entertaining first, it’s got to be commercially driven projects. It’s not even easy even from a climate perspective, right? How to cut through the jargon and the noise and the complexity to tell a straightforward, interesting, compelling story,” she says.
Characters tell stories
ITV has achieved this with hit drama After the Flood, though the commissioner charged with overseeing its second series, Huw Kennair-Jones, believes “the fact that it included elements of a flood and its aftermath were a bonus”. Instead, he says, “it was very much the characters and the story that attracted us and subsequently, we believe, the audience.”
Kennair-Jones adds that the challenge of climate storytelling is “making it not feel that the audience is being preached at”. As for the Climate Content Pledge, he says: “Each drama we commission is based on the merits of the individual story in whatever dramatic genre it’s in. We’re open to any ideas that promise to tell the best stories for ITV1 and the ITVX audience. It’s first and foremost always about the brilliance of the story.”
Mette Nelund, head of drama at TV 2 Denmark, takes a similar position on climate-related stories. Her drama department does not have a strategy on climate storytelling, but did commission Oscar-winning director Thomas Vinterberg’s Danish drama series, Families Like Ours, with StudioCanal and Canal+.
Set in Denmark in the near future, when rising sea levels have caused the country to be evacuated, the drama was one of the most watched series on TV 2 in 2024, attracting around one million viewers in Denmark and provoking debate about the implications of such a climate catastrophe in real life. The drama was recently acquired by the BBC.
Nelund say the climate event in the drama, however, did not influence the decision for commissioning it. “We commissioned it because it’s a story that touches our hearts,” she says. “It is a family saga about saying farewell, loss, hope and new beginnings. It’s concerned with examining human reactions in situations where wealth and cultural belonging and all kinds of normality disappear.”
Kai Finke, chief content officer at European streamer SkyShowtime, takes a more proactive stance on climate-storytelling on our screens. “Climate change undeniably is one of the biggest themes of our time and it is reflected in a lot of our shows and in many of our shareholder shows, even as a subplot or as something that is being commented on [in a show],” he says.
The European streamer has a number of shows that touch on the climate change theme, including dystopian thriller, Snowpiercer, post-apocalyptic TV series, Helgoland 513, the Sky enviro-thriller Gabon: Earth’s Last Chance, and the five-parter doc Inside Greenpeace.
Nicola Starr, founder of Fourth Act, an LA-based impact consultancy working in film and TV, says the majority of the conversations she’s having now are climate-related, but most are not US-based. “They’re in Chile or the UK or Australia and New Zealand,” she says, adding: There are some really creative ways to tell climate stories and there’s so many different ways and approaches. It’s just like any genre, it’s limitless.”
Annabel Jones, executive producer of Toxic Town, says she would like to see more scripted climate-related stories on our screens. “I feel passionately that TV should reflect the world we live in. Climate change is one of the biggest threats modern human beings have ever faced and drama has a unique power to bring to life the emotional and societal impacts of that in a way that documentaries or articles can’t necessarily.”
Steve Smith, lead sustainability adviser at Picture Zero, a film and TV sustainability consultancy and production company based in the UK, says: “What broadcasters are really keen to do is to find ways that we can integrate climate storytelling into everyday content. So how do we get climate stories into Casualty, into EastEnders, into The One Show, into the programmes that audiences love and come back to? Because that, I think, is where we have the biggest opportunity to influence behaviour change.”
Michael Cordell is creative director and co-founder of leading Australian independent prodco CJZ, the company behind provocative factual format Go Back To Where you Came From, which was a hit for SBS in Australia and has been adapted for Channel 4 in the UK. He says he is deeply concerned about climate change and says it is up to producers and storytellers to counter disinformation around the subject.
“It is up to [us] to tell the truth in subversive, compelling and fresh ways, based on facts, not wishful thinking or wilful blindness,” he says. “We’ve pitched environmentally themed versions of Go Back and are still investigating alternative scenarios as we speak. My latest pitch is having a group of participants live on a disappearing iceberg or glacier for a month creating drama, tension and a host of informative adventures. It’s called Deep Freeze and I’d love to talk to any commissioners who may be reading.”
Kids see the bigger picture
While Cordell and others push commissioners to take up the challenge for compelling climate storytelling, those in the kids’ sector are going direct to their audience, where eco-anxiety is on the rise. A recent YouGov survey of over 600 children commissioned by Greenpeace UK, shows worries about climate change are widespread among primary school children, with 78% saying they’re worried about it and over a quarter (27%) very worried.
Catherine Winder, CEO of Wind Sun Sky Entertainment, a multi- platform entertainment company based in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Toronto, says her company is on “a mission to close the hope gap for young kids.” It has teamed up with educational charity ClearWater Foundation on Future Chicken, an eco-entertainment series that is available on the YouTube Kids app.
“It’s a digital first world that encourages kids to be part of climate solutions,” says Winder about the show, adding: “First and foremost, we as storytellers have a responsibility to help children because we know how impactful media can be. And if we can use media and the power of media to inspire kids and even adults to participate in solutions, then we’re doing our job. And children, let’s face it, they want to make a difference when it comes to the future health of the planet.”
Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, based on the Peter Brown children’s books, is described by Joyner as a story that helps people of all ages “to find meaning and courage in the face of the climate crisis”. The only movie nominated for an Oscar in 2025 that passed Good Energy’s Climate Reality Check, the film has grossed over $300 million at the box office worldwide making it one of the top 100 highest-grossing animated movies globally. A convenient truth, perhaps, for telling more entertaining screen-based stories that are relevant to one of the biggest threats of our times.
Make your voice heard in C21’s Big Picture Climate Consensus, the first initiative of its kind to seek consensus from across the global content community on how the industry should respond to the climate crisis.
